Case: Clouds as a means of optimizing IT infrastructure
Often, business representatives who for one reason or another do not have their own IT expertise (a common situation is the lack of specialists in small companies) are forced to overpay for expensive “software” and “iron” solutions due to an elementary lack of knowledge. At the same time, experienced integrators and IT companies can help solve many problems with much less power. Today we would like to talk about our experience in a similar situation.
Situation
Once the company received a project request from a large international company, which decided to open an additional office in Moscow.
After talking with the specialists of the client company, it became clear that for the needs of the office two mid-level servers would be enough - one file and one terminal - in the future, one more could be added to them (database server). This is a fairly typical set of tasks, without any fantasies - all the software and all the iron infrastructure are designed for 20 jobs, both stationary and with remote access. Of course, every workplace should have office software and the ability to communicate by mail.
The company was just opening an office in Moscow, so in the future, with a successful set of circumstances, planned to expand it by hiring more employees. However, neither the approximate number of new people, nor the dates in which they may appear, were known. It was also necessary to take this into account when creating the infrastructure.
Problems
The room for the future office was located in a beautiful historical building in the very center of the city. However, beauty was beauty, but from the point of view of IT, the building had nothing to boast of - in particular, it did not have dedicated server rooms (and free space for their organization from scratch), but there were difficulties with cooling and ventilation of technical rooms.
Decision
When building a technical infrastructure, a good solution is to move various system components to the cloud. In addition to simple convenience, this allows you to reduce costs - the need to purchase real “iron” servers disappears (although in this particular project the costs for the client company were not important).
This solution allows you to ensure the reliability of the infrastructure, which for most customers is the most important point - there is no risk of server failure and the impact of various unforeseen circumstances (for example, a flood in the office).
With virtual machines, life is a little easier. The same, for example, can be said about the service of organizing a virtual PBX- The virtual telephone exchange is easy to maintain, which is very convenient for companies that outsource IT services and do not have their own technical specialists.
However, not everything is so smooth, and there are certain disadvantages when implementing such a scheme of work. The main one is that when moving to the cloud, business representatives often distrust the safety and confidentiality of data. In the case of large companies with branches, the head office often provides well-defined security policies that must be met by locally procured IT services - right down to the template sets of hardware used.
Implementation
As a result, it was decided to take advantage of both the cloud and the “iron” solutions, combining them.
A server was delivered to the office client in a sufficient configuration for its tasks (Windows Server, Quad Core XEON, 16Gb Ram, 2x2Tb HDD).
Not the bulk of the infrastructure was hosted on virtual machines in Celecom distributed data centers, backups also stacked in the cloud. For the virtual machine to be allocated two processor cores and 6 GB of RAM.
Thanks to the web-based interface of the control system, the management of the client company can adjust the level of consumption, reduce or add machine resources through a personal account, based on statistics presented in the same interface. The virtual machine server disk was 100 GB in size.
Office software (MS Office and mail on Exchange) was also transferred to the cloud. The client company has leased software as a service. This approach made it possible to simplify the tasks of administering licenses depending on the staff turnover and the process of recruiting new employees.
Maintenance of both the software and hardware of the built-up infrastructure was completely transferred to our company, which allowed the client to concentrate on solving the problems of their business, without being distracted by the administration of the telephone network.
Result
As a result of a rather short project, the client company received a modern solution (IT infrastructure, software, remote access and virtual telephony network) with backup and the ability to quickly scale if necessary in the future. At the same time, the need to independently configure and support the system disappeared (the client had no plans to hire IT personnel in the Moscow branch), in addition, by using cloud technologies, it was possible to reduce the total cost of the project.
Related posts: